On the Sharpness of Some Results Relating Cuts and Crossing Numbers

Laurent Beaudou, Drago Bokal

Abstract

It is already known that for very small edge cuts in graphs, the crossing number of the graph is at least the sum of the crossing number of (slightly augmented) components resulting from the cut. Under stronger connectivity condition in each cut component that was formalized as a graph operation called zip product, a similar result was obtained for edge cuts of any size, and a natural question was asked, whether this stronger condition is necessary. In this paper, we prove that the relaxed condition is not sufficient when the size of the cut is at least four, and we prove that the gap can grow quadratically with the cut size.